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Considering the Clinton/Lewinsky headlines, an in-depth, analytically informed text on sexual addiction is timely. The Goodman book, Sexual Addiction, provides a comprehensive theoretical formulation that includes biological, socio-cultural and psychoanalytic perspectives on an arena of pathology that has been overlooked for too long.
Goodman resolves the age old debate about whether this disorder is an addiction or a compulsion. It is identified as both a compulsion and an addiction under the global rubric of “a driven spectrum disorder.” It has obsessive compulsive, affective, addictive and impulse control features, and a broader range of etiologic sources. With this formulation in hand, the reader appreciates the complexity of sexual addiction and its treatment.
Goodman's psychoanalytic perspective on sexual addiction has been sorely missing from the literature. He examines factors that result in the development of general addictive patterns as well as those that lead to sexual addiction. His developmental model examines deficient maternal responsiveness and other pre-Oedipal issues that result in ego weakness, including unusually intense castration anxiety, fantasies of gender bipotentiality, splitting and superego pathology. Goodman goes on to theorize that these factors result in an impaired internalization of self-regulatory ego and superego functions, a disrupted transition through the separation-individuation process and abnormally high levels of pre-Oedipal aggression.
The specific factors that relate to the development of sexual addiction include seductiveness and sexualization by the mother, which induces precocious genitalization and identification with the mother's sexualization. Goodman believes that the child eventually uses sexual strategies to fulfill self